The first time I tried to update the BIOS from the exe file, it appeared to succeed, and I got a pop-up indicating successful install after the restart. However, Desktop Utilities or booting into the BIOS indicated that it was still on 0014. The second attempt to update succeeded, but the system would blue screen early in Windows startup (Win7 Ultimate, x64). It turned out that during the update, the BIOS setting for SATA had changed from RAID to AHCI. Setting it back to RAID resulted in the system booting normally, so I'm not looking for help, just hoping to save someone else from having to troubleshoot if this happens again.

Certainly, in some cases, the BIOS update can reset the settings from RAID, back to AHCI; which can cause Windows not to start. Changing the option in the BIOS takes care of the problem. Thank you for your input, dnickason.

I had the same problem and configuration, but in my case, after I set the option back to RAID, it still wouldn't boot. Wound up having to reinstall WIndows. Fortunately, I didn't lose any data, just had a major inconvenience.

Two questions

Why did the BIOS update indicate a successful update, but not actually install the first time?

Why does it change the SATA setting to AHCI after a successful install?

At the very least, there should be a warning, but in my opinion, the various BIOS options should never be reset as a result of an update.

In my opinion, this is a bug in the BIOS update. With my prior Intel board, I updated the BIOS a number of times without ever having a failure, or having a setting change in the process. This was the first time I updated a DZ68DB, and you're right, after I wrote my original post, I ended up discovering that all the BIOS settings had reverted to their defaults, not just the RAID.

I very much doubt that Intel deliberately released a BIOS that resets everything to the default settings, but didn't document that on the download page or in the readme or release notes. So this was either a dumb luck, corner case scenario that only you and I ran into, or a bug. I'm running a very similar configuration to yours - just SRC instead of RAID 1 - so I'm hard pressed to see how you could blame our hardware or anything specific to our systems.